Advice appreciated on community contributions approach

Posted Oct 29, 2009 6:52 UTC (Thu) by kripkenstein (guest, #43281)
Parent article: Community contributions and copyright assignment

Interesting article, and coincidentally relevant to a project of mine. I won't spam you with a link, but here is the approach I am considering doing, I would appreciate comments:

1. My own code in this project is AGPL.
2. The project bundles some other pre-existing libraries, with compatible licenses, like zlib, Apache, etc.
3. For contributions, I let people either (a) submit it under a compatible license like Apache, in which case they hold sole copyright, or (b) submit it as AGPL, with joint copyright assignment, allowing me to relicense it.

In other words, I am already bundling code with compatible licenses in this project, and people submitting new code under a compatible license is basically like more such code. Or, if they aren't comfortable with a permissive license like Apache or zlib, they can use the AGPL, but then I guess they need to trust me regarding other licenses I use it for.

Does this seem like a fair arrangement? Also, is any project already doing something like this (I can't seem to think of one)? I hope there isn't some fatal flaw I am missing.

Advice appreciated on community contributions approach

Posted Oct 29, 2009 8:34 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (4 responses)

Dual licensing is rather problematic both from the community perspective as well as a business arrangement. Over time, even projects like MySQL have been getting more revenue from traditional support and services as opposed to selling proprietary licenses. Trolltech changed from GPL to LGPL for Qt as well. What happens if there is a very good piece of AGPL licensed code that the author is unwilling to submit to you under your copyright license agreement?

Why not just require that all contributions must be permissively licensed and skip everything else. IIUC, that's what drizzle, a fork of MySQL does and it seems they are very successful is getting community contributors compared to MySQL.

Advice appreciated on community contributions approach

Posted Oct 29, 2009 9:09 UTC (Thu) by kripkenstein (guest, #43281) [Link]

Thanks, I wasn't aware of Drizzle's interesting contributions approach. I will consider adopting it. (But maybe with AGPL/Apache as opposed to Drizzle's GPL/BSD? Need to think about it.)

Advice appreciated on community contributions approach

Posted Oct 29, 2009 12:22 UTC (Thu) by sandmann (subscriber, #473) [Link] (2 responses)

Would it be possible to come up with a scheme where contributors were compensated if the code were ever to be relicensed commercially?

Ie., have them sign something that said "you can relicense it, but you'll have to pay $x to J. Hacker".

Advice appreciated on community contributions approach

Posted Oct 29, 2009 12:58 UTC (Thu) by kripkenstein (guest, #43281) [Link]

I am sure that is possible, at least in theory, but it might have practical issues.

For example, if you want to relicense a few years later, and can't get ahold of all the original contributors to pay them, that would be problematic. Or if something happened to them you need to find their next of kin.

Maybe it could work in this way: If you relicense, you need to publicly advertise that fact, and the authors then have the option to contact you for $X within 1 year from the announcement.

Not sure how I feel about that approach, though. For one thing, would it be $X per contributor? Then 1,000 lines of patches are the same as 1? Or is it by lines of code? Seems troubling either way.

Advice appreciated on community contributions approach

Posted Nov 6, 2009 0:23 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

I've been thinking what I'd do.

I suspect I'd settle for "you give me the right to exempt people from the requirement to provide source, provided the binaries are unmodified".

That way, I could licence commercial companies to sell a binary-only, "proprietary" product, but they would lose the right to make proprietary changes. If they wanted to change the source, they would have to give their changes to me for me to make them freely available, in order to be able to distribute their changes.

Cheers,
Wol